Customer Group functionality has been available in KonaKart since Version 2.2.3.0.
A customer group is a way of aggregating customers that are similar in some way. For example, you may use them to distinguish between retail and wholesale customers or between company employees and external customers etc.
Customer groups may be created and maintained using the KonaKart Admin application. Once a group has been created, you can associate a customer to that group through a drop list in the Edit Customer panel. When editing a customer, if the Customer group is changed to a valid new group, you will be prompted to send a template based email to the customer. This is a useful feature for when the customer is going through an approval process. For example, a customer may have registered through the application as a wholesale customer. During registration he was placed in a "Waiting for Approval" customer group and now the administrator may approve or decline the request. As a result of the approval, the customer may receive an email informing him of the decision. The template used is in the form CustGroupChange_groupId_lang.vm e.g. CustGroupChange_2_en.vm, if the customer has been moved to the group with id equals 2 in a system where the language code is "en". This means that different templates can be used depending on which group the customer has been moved to. i.e. You could have different templates for approved and denied requests.
Groups may be used to:
Control what prices are displayed to customers.
Each group has a PriceId attribute which may have a value of 0 to 3. When set to 0, a customer belonging to that group will see the normal price of the product (i.e. the price attribute). When set to 1, the customer will see the price defined in the Price 1 attribute of the product and so on for 2 and 3. This functionality for example, allows you to display wholesale prices to wholesale customers and retail prices to retail customers. If a customer belongs to no groups, then the price from the normal price attribute is displayed. Note that in the Admin App you may change the price labels from Price1, Price2 etc. to a more meaningful description such as Wholesale price, MRP, Employee price etc.
Enable promotions.
Promotions may be enabled for customers belonging to a particular group. i.e. You may want to enable certain promotions just for your retail customers.
Send communications.
Bulk emails may be sent to only customers belonging to a particular customer group.
Mailing Lists can be created containing only customers belonging to a particular customer group.